


your little silhouettes

by cirrus (themorninglark)



Series: SASO 2017 [18]
Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Challenge: Sports Anime Shipping Olympics | SASO 2017, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-09
Updated: 2017-07-09
Packaged: 2018-11-29 21:21:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11449278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themorninglark/pseuds/cirrus
Summary: The coastline was a map that they’d traced, one late afternoon, over a poster in an empty classroom. They’d left theshogipieces on the table, still in their victory stance. With a steady hand, Akashi showed Midorima the way across this atlas. He looked at him, said,no one else knows.





	your little silhouettes

**Author's Note:**

> Written for SASO 2017 Bonus Round 3: Fan Soundtracks | [originally posted here](http://sportsanime.dreamwidth.org/22341.html?thread=12923973#cmt12923973)
> 
> soundtrack:  
> [of monsters and men - little talks](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IY8rOSyR5Rw)  
> [of monsters and men - silhouettes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BBksAK0f0g)  
> [of monsters and men - your bones](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXUloVYbchg)

It was many years before Akashi invited him to go to the lighthouse again. Midorima did not question it—neither the lapse, nor the turnaround—for Akashi had his reasons, he knew, and he had learned long ago enough that it was an exercise in futility to try and pick them apart. Perhaps it was not so much a turnaround as a sideways glance. Akashi was not in the habit of looking over his shoulder, allowing shadows and valleys to catch up with him.

 _Will you come out again with me this summer?_  he had asked, over a static line that crackled.  _The house is much too big for me alone._

So Midorima set aside his medical books, entrusted his spider plant to Takao and packed a bag. It was late in the evening when his train pulled into the station. Akashi was waiting for him on the platform. In his hand, he held a scalloped seashell the colour of bone-white china; today’s lucky item cool between his fingers, their fingers, as he pressed it into Midorima’s.

Of course, Midorima already had one in his pocket, but luck dispensed by Akashi was a different kind of gift.

On their drive back, Akashi turned off the radio, rolled down the roof and let the breeze into the car. It tickled at Midorima’s nose. The reflections shimmered like a mirage on the warm road, all the way down to the Akashi family’s holiday home.

The last time he had been a guest here, he’d had a whole room to himself. For him, they had graciously made up the room with the sea view. Midorima would wake to the cry of gulls, the tide coming in, and Akashi, sliding his door open unnanounced. He’d pad barefoot across the corridor that divided them, join Midorima on the edge of his futon; together, they’d watch the day dawn, the silence between them an unspeakable, fragile thing. The lighthouse was a speck on the horizon. Some mornings, it seemed to fade into the low-hanging clouds, its silhouette so pale and gauzy that the night before seemed like a fevered dream. Then they’d do it all over again, and Midorima would drift into restless sleep with Akashi’s name like embers in his mouth.

This time, some things remained, like the room and the view. Some things, Midorima noted, had changed, like the two futons side by side. Akashi carried his bag in for him and put it next to his.

In the distance, the light flickered.

Akashi followed his gaze.  _We can go whenever you're ready._

Midorima swapped out his sensible shoes for beach-appropriate flip-flops that he’d had to dig out of an old dust bag, put on a windbreaker, and stepped out onto the porch to join Akashi.

The coastline was a map that they’d traced, one late afternoon, over a poster in an empty classroom. They’d left the  _shogi_  pieces on the table, still in their victory stance. With a steady hand, Akashi showed Midorima the way across this atlas. He looked at him, said,  _no one else knows_.

As Akashi took hold of his bandaged fingers now, led them across barnacle-encrusted rocks and inlets full of seaweed, it seemed to Midorima that it was both a shorter and longer walk than he remembered. They were older now, no longer teenagers who could have sprinted to the end of the beach and back, but he had learned to view distances with a philosophical bent.

Here at the base of the lighthouse, the setting sun set fire to the sea.

Of course Akashi had timed it all perfectly, down to the train ticket he’d bought Midorima, and Midorima had never resented this; that for Akashi, he was sometimes a rival, sometimes another piece in a secret game of his, sometimes a moth caught unwitting in his web. Sometimes, a harbour. He was many things to Akashi, and that was more than most people were.

As they sat down on the outcropping, Midorima felt Akashi’s grip tighten round his hand, thought, for a split second, that he might not let go. Then he did, and turned to face the horizon.

Midorima had never held the sea in any particular esteem. Beach holidays meant sand in his toes and his shorts, in uncomfortable places, and saltwater stung his eyes and all his orifices. A hermit crab had bitten him once on the sole of his foot. He had carefully plastered over it and it had thrown off his toss for a day’s worth of practice. He’d made all the baskets in the end anyway, but it had stuck with him, the imprecision, like a niggling scar.

Out here, with Akashi’s breathing shallow and measured next to him and the light above their heads, spreading, slowly painting the water a brilliant shade of burning, he felt the scar prick again. Conversations roiled on the waves far below them.

Akashi laced his fingers in his lap, a deliberate gesture, and sat up straight.

_Shintarou—_

Midorima had heard this before. His first name, falling from Akashi’s lips. He had heard it merciless, wielded to wound; he had heard it unforgiving, a desert wind that left him parched.

In this spot, he had heard it stripped bare, a tender flame that he could hold on to.

He reached out, closed his hand around it again. This time, he let it take him.


End file.
